New cold war

“Prism, prism on the wall, who’s the most trustworthy of them all?” said Huawei’s rotating chairman Guo Ping on stage on Tuesday at Mobile World Congress 2019. But Guo wasn’t talking about Snow White. He was poking fun at the massive surveillance programs maintained by the United States. Read More >>

The US launched an unarmed Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile from Vandenberg Air Force Base on 5 February in what’s shaping up to be a busy week of missile tests around the world. Much like other recent launches, the US military insists that this latest test has nothing to do with current events, as military tensions rise in the US, Russia, and China. Read More >>

Facebook has deleted hundreds of pages linked to the Kremlin-backed propaganda network known as Sputnik. The pages, allegedly operated by Sputnik employees, were made to look like they were coming from outside of Russia. The Facebook pages helped spread propaganda about NATO and European politics, among many other topics. Read More >>

Ren Zhengfei, the billionaire founder and CEO of Chinese tech company Huawei, gave a rare roundtable interview with reporters today to discuss security concerns. The 74-year-old insisted that his company isn’t beholden to the Chinese government and he called Donald Trump a “great president” because the American leader has cut taxes for businesses. It was the first time Ren has talked with the foreign press since 2015. Read More >>

Russia tested a new hypersonic glide missile system today under direct orders from President Vladimir Putin, according to reports from Russian state media. The new system, called the Avangard, utilises an intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and a hypersonic glide vehicle and is supposed to travel at roughly five times the speed of sound. Read More >>

North Korean state media announced recently that the country’s leader, Kim Jong Un, recently oversaw tests of a “newly developed ultramodern tactical weapon.” The new report is extremely light on details, but it’s a reminder that very little has actually changed in the US-North Korea relationship since President Donald Trump took power. Both countries have nuclear weapons and both are on a hair trigger as they develop new capabilities. Read More >>

The New York Times published a troubling report yesterday alleging that President Trump uses off-the-shelf iPhones to talk with friends and that both Russian and Chinese spies are listening to Trump’s phone calls to figure out how to manipulate him. But China would like the American president to know that if he’s worried about security, he can always switch to Huawei. Read More >>

In what could be the most important national security story of the decade, a new report alleges that China has been installing tiny microchips, roughly the size of a grain of rice, on the motherboards of countless servers imported into the U.S. Read More >>

What made US diplomats in Cuba and China severely sick over the past two years? We still don’t know for sure. But US officials now suspect that the Russian government might have had something to do with it. At least that’s the theory being floated by anonymous sources to NBC News. Read More >>

British police and counterterrorism officials have identified two men they believe are responsible for the poisoning of former double agent Sergei Skripal, his daughter Yulia Skripal, as well as two bystanders. The suspects are Russians, identified as Alexander Petrov and Ruslan Boshirov, though British authorities say the names are probably aliases. Read More >>

China has an army of internet censors who comb through the web and block information that the government doesn’t want its people to see. But the job of the censors is about to get easier if Google has its way. The tech giant is planning to release a new censored version of its search engine and apps in the land of 1.3 billion people. Read More >>

The U.S. State Department issued a health warning yesterday to U.S. citizens in China after an American government worker was diagnosed with a mild traumatic brain injury. The unnamed worker reported “subtle and vague, but abnormal, sensations of sound and pressure.” Read More >>

Few people would think of cartoon character Peppa Pig as a subversive icon. But don’t tell that to the Chinese government. China has started to ban Peppa Pig from social media for being too “gangster,” deleting over 30,000 videos of the cartoon pig on one platform alone. Read More >>

What would happen if a nuclear weapon fell in your back garden? You and everything around you would be destroyed, of course. But how many casualties would there be in the surrounding area? And what would it look like if it was a North Korean nuke versus a Russian nuke? Read More >>

The Russia's UK Embassy is known for being a troll online. So it’s no surprise that it’s being pretty flippant about the recent news that a Russian spy was poisoned with a nerve agent in London. Make that a British spy who was poisoned with a nerve agent in London. Because being pedantic about headlines is clearly what’s important in this story. Read More >>